Deeply Odd(33)

On both sides of the corridor were a few doors like the one through which I had just come. America’s primary institution of learning—the movies—has taught us that when we find ourselves in a strange and eerily quiet place with lots of doors, waiting behind one of them will be either a psychopathic killer or a monster of supernatural or extraterrestrial origin. Of course, if it’s an Adam Sandler comedy, behind the door will lurk a goofy dude waiting to deliver a joke involving poop, pee, or genitals. I wasn’t in such a comedy, but that was all right, because I preferred a psychopath or a monster.

When I opened the nearest door on the right, nothing bit off my head. A single lamp hung in the center of the unfurnished gray room.

I crossed to the windows and was stunned to see the sprawling suburbs of the valley cast in darkness, not one streetlamp or building light to be seen. Far beyond the Hollywood hills, to the southwest, no faintest glow rose from the flatlands of Los Angeles and environs, though on an ordinary night, the incandescence of civilization would shimmer in the air and paint the bellies of the clouds a burnt-butter yellow. Above the black land, the blacker sky had been swept clean of moon and stars.

In the middle distance, three widely separated lakes of low flames glimmered and twinkled red-orange-blue, like the baleful campfires of savage and malevolent settlements. They burned without illuminating their surroundings, as if the night air had unnatural weight sufficient to prevent the light from rising.

Although the uncanny gloom flooded the land before, between, and beyond the pooling fires, the realm on the farther side of the windows was not blind-dark. I was able to discern that the street in front of this building had vanished, replaced by barren ground. And suddenly I knew that the suburbs and the city they encircled had not merely gone dark in a power outage but had ceased to exist either as intact structures or as ruins. In my reality, this building stood in an industrial neighborhood, but in Elsewhere, it seemed to loom alone above a blackened wasteland.

I had wanted a window with a view. Now I wanted a quiet corner in which I could curl up in a ball and suck my thumb until my fairy godmother came and took me away from this hostile, empty world.

In this blighted kingdom, however, wishes were answered in such a perverse way that they were far better left unwished. Twenty feet below, where the street should have been, something moved, a vertical shadow in the otherwise still and amorphous dark. Squinting, I saw what might have been a man, but he was so little differentiated from the murk around him that I couldn’t make out his face or determine what he wore. One thing about him was certain: He didn’t have fairy wings.

If the weak light in the room around me filtered through the glass, none of it reached as far as the figure below, although it revealed me to him. He halted, I sensed him looking up, but I did not draw back from the window. I had already been seen. He would come to me or he wouldn’t. After a moment, he approached the front of the building, disappearing into the recessed entrance.

Pistol in hand, I returned to the second-floor hall. Moments before, I had climbed the west stairs, which originated at the garage in back. The door at the east end of the hallway suggested another stairwell rising from the front of the building, which was probably the one by which he would come to me.

My keen intuition, which had often been my salvation, was largely a mental faculty, its physical expression limited to an occasional tingle at the nape of the neck, the hairs bristling on the backs of my hands and—unseemly but true—a certain tightening of the scrotum, although that last reaction was about as erotic as a spinal tap. In this instance, a swift series of chills quivered violently through me, as if I were constructed entirely of taut harpstrings that thrummed with glissandos of foreboding.

At all costs, I needed to avoid a confrontation with that shadowy figure. I didn’t know why I must keep my distance from the man, if man he was, and I had no one to ask, because intuition is a one-way communication from God, who never seems inclined to satisfy our curiosity, perhaps because, given the chance, every one of us would be like a child on a family road trip, endlessly asking Are we there yet? or the equivalent.

I turned away from the east end of the corridor and hurried to the west stairs, by which I had come up from the garage. Going down again seemed foolhardy, in part because leaving the building wasn’t an option. If I ventured outside into unknown conditions, I might find it difficult if not impossible to get back inside. I assumed that I would have to be within the envelope of the building to be able to return to my reality when the shift occurred again, which might be hours or mere minutes from now.